The field of the present invention is in peach pitting machines, for example of the type disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 2,376,526. In later developments of the patented machine, as well as in other similar types of peach pitting machines, a whole peach is cut in half along its suture plane, and the pit half is removed from each pit half by either making a cut around the curved side of the pit half to free the pit, or by pulling, twisting, or pushing the pit half away from the fruit. Among the many patented improvements of the basic Thompson machine, the cutting type of pitting operation is disclosed in U.S. Pat. Vadas et al No. 3,045,731, issued Feb. 17, 1958, and a pushing type of pitting operation is disclosed in my U.S. Pat. No. 3,225,904, issued on December 28, 1965.
A problem which is common to prior art peach pitting operations is that the pit of the peach may be split either before or during the pitting operation, because the pits are sometimes weak and easily broken. As a result, the pitting operation may not remove all of the pit. Since the peach halves cannot be repitted in the same machine which initially does the pitting, it has been customary to manually segregate the defectively pitted peach halves and cut out the pit fragments by hand. This can be costly because of the high ratio of defective pits (either weak or split) sometimes found in large lots of peaches delivered to the processor.